Thanks for sparking this conversation, Joel. There are too many questions posed to weigh in succinctly in this format, but I think that Richard's responses offer a great place to start.
First, there is no question that the NC term is problematic in the education space. The issue really boils down to one of intent. . . If the intent of the creator is to profit (monetarily) from the works, then the NC term is perfectly reasonable. Otherwise, it generally doesn't make sense. The problem is that most people apply the license due to a sense of moral placement; i.e., if I am not intending to make any money, why should I allow anyone else to do so? I think that this position is the inevitable outcome of many, many years of societal positioning regarding the “noble” status of those in the teaching profession. To the extent that being a university faculty member is a sacrifice (a tenuous position, in my view), then it makes sense that faculty would feel the need to prevent their work from being used profitably (in all senses of the word) by anyone else.
Note that there are currently other very good reasons for the NC term, reflective of this particular moment in time. Most of the existing educational material on the planet is not openly licensed, and re-licensing such materials more openly requires negotiation with substantial quantities of third-party materials in most educational resources. The OU (UK) has shown quite clearly that third-party rights-holders are far more likely to grant permission to “open up” their materials if the NC term is applied. So, in the interest of expediency, the NC term can buy you quite a lot. There are other situations that are comparable.
Note also that I think the SA term (such as in the GNU GPL) is just as problematic as the NC term, in that it more a reflection of a desire to control user behavior rather than a mechanism for endowing creative works with useful properties. If a digital work is openly licensed, there is no way for that original work to be co-opted by someone else. The fact that it may be derived in interesting ways, and then relicensed to protect that investment, does not change the access to and permissions of the original. Besides, thus far, there is little evidence that works licensed CC BY (as opposed to CC BY-SA) are being co-opted in this manner. On the other hand, we know that CC BY-SA works are not interoperable with non-SA works, so there are significant opportunities for interesting educational mash-ups which cannot be shared, unless the resulting works all become SA, which users are not always at liberty to decide.
That being said, there are some places (e.g., wikis) where the SA dictate seems to work well. And if the world resolves itself to have two silos of open content (SA and non-SA), as opposed to our current situation, then we'll be in great shape, so at ccLearn we simply encourage people to strongly consider one of those two licensing options as being more appropriate than anything else.
I think the question of roles and policies for university IP is really interesting, and it will be quite some time before such things get sorted out, if ever. Here again, the lack of strict interpretation of the “attribution” requirement works in our favor, I think. Professional norms of practice are likely to suffice in most cases. It is my hope that CC licensing will re-establish some sanity in the whole debate about who owns the IP. Ideas cannot be copyrighted anyway, so to the extent that the IP fight is about controlling ideas, it's totally inappropriate. If an idea has a possible application, then the faculty member and the university should assess the extent to which patents and such make good business sense. In the vast majority of the cases, the answer will be no, since universities are not really designed (and hopefully will not be designed) to execute projects in a business environment. If a faculty member feels that his/her ideas have great potential for development outside of the university setting, then what's stopping them? As long as the ideas, and hopefully their expression, are openly disseminated, then no one can prevent them (or anyone else) from trying to capitalize on those developments. Too much work is suffering from lack of access and hoarding; it would be nice to change this situation, and perhaps open licenses can be part of the solution.
Anyway, happy to see some debate and thoughts here. Hope to see more of the same.
-Ahrash Bissell
- 791 reads
